Clinical decision support tools

Clinical Decision Support tools are reference resources designed to support clinical decision-making. Health care professionals utilise these tools to quickly lookup information concerning diagnostic and treatment guidance at the point-of-care with a patient.

Clinical Decision Support tools contain detailed summaries of a wide range of conditions and interventions, supported by synthesized and evaluated evidence-based research and/or peer-reviewed sources. Summaries are curated by health professionals and regularly updated to reflect new evidence. Summaries can include levels of evidence, rating scales or grade recommendations as well as citations back to the original research studies, systematic reviews, or guidelines.

BMJ Best Practice is a clinical decision support tool, uniquely structured around the patient consultation, with advice on symptom evaluation, tests to order and treatment approach. Access to BMJ Best Practice is provided by Health Education England to all NHS staff in England.

Features:

• summaries on 1000 conditions across 32 specialties, 11,000 differential diagnosis, 7000+ guidelines
• prioritized updates as follows: drug withdrawals or changes that may affect patient safety within 24-48 hours; evidence that changes practice within one month; evidence that confirms current practice within three months.
• monitors over 5000 journals
• drug information via the BNF & BNFc
• 500+ medical calculators
• Accredited for CME/CPD activities and learning are tracked. Accredited by the RCGP and other institutions
• Patient leaflets
• Incorporates Cochrane Clinical Answers
• EBM Toolkit with checklists and tools to support evaluating studies

• NEW! The Comorbidities tool is the only point of care tool that supports the management of the whole patient by including guidance on the treatment of a patient's acute condition alongside their pre-existing comorbidities. 

For access go to the BMJ Best Practice website using your OpenAthens username and password. If you are a new user, you will need to now register for a BMJ Best Practice personal account. Personal accounts allow you to track CME/CPD activity and to log in to the BMJ Best Practice app using your personal account credentials. This is a quick one-off registration that will link your two accounts together and going forward you can then use your personal account to log in directly to BMJ Best Practice website and app.

UpToDate is a time saving, evidence-based, clinical decision at point of care, support tool. It contains all of the internal medicine sub-specialties (at a level that meets the needs of the sub specialist), primary care, internal medicine, ob/gyn,paediatrics, general surgery, and more – all in one resource. To access UpToDate users are required to create an authenticated personal account, this can only be done whilst logged onto the Barts Health trust network.

Once a personal account has been created users can then access UpToDate from any location and can also download and access the app version. UpToDate personal accounts must be re-authenticated every 90 days to ensure continued access and this must be done whilst logged onto the Barts Health trust network. We recommend that users do not try to access UpToDate using OpenAthens, due to conflicts between OpenAthens and Personal account access.